[Walkley attacks Scribe's plays as the productions of a hack pandering to the tastes of a bourgeois audience.]

Scribe, the greatest of all theatrical purveyors, died so long ago (1861), and is so completely forgotten, that it is high time to have a book about him. A Professor in the University of California, Dr. Neil Cole Arvin, obliges with one—Eugène Scribe and the French Theatre, written from that distance which lends enchantment to the view as well as some errors in perspective. Was Scribe really so important in the history of the theatre? Did he so markedly influence his successors? "Practically every innovation, every reform, every novelty found in the drama of the nineteenth century," says Dr. Arvin, "originated with Scribe, and the highest point in the development of the main genres of dramatic literature was reached in his plays." This, if true at all, is only true of the technicalities, the machinery of the theatre, the mere stage-carpentry—things that matter very little and may almost be said to invent themselves. Everything of value in the modern theatre, its intellectual dialectic, its emotional sincerity, its fundamental verisimilitude, has been a revolt against that shallow theatricality which we call Scribism.

Of Scribe's own 300 and odd plays, which were once to be seen not only in Paris but in every theatre in Europe, the sole survivor to-day is Adrienne Lecouvreur—and that from the mere accident that its heroine caught the fancy of Sarah Bernhardt. Now that Sarah is gone, I doubt if we shall ever see Adrienne again. Scribe's great success—commercial success—in his day was, like other commercial successes, the result of three things: a natural instinct for the business, industry and skill in meeting a popular demand, and a certain mediocrity of mind. Scribe was born for the theatre and scribbled plays almost from infancy. He consistently catered for the tastes of his public—that curious, mixed bourgeoisie of his time, the Royalists of the Faubourg St Germain, the ex-Imperialists of the Faubourg St Honoré, and the new rich of the Chaussée d'Antin. These various interests he was careful to conciliate, generally by a system of mixed marriages. The Royalist heroine married the Imperial colonel's nephew, or the young marquis, ruined at cards, but an accomplished horseman, married the banker's daughter. The proper thing was to marry for money, an eminently bourgeois the passion of love Scribe left to the romantic playwrights. Indeed, money plays as conspicuous a part in Scribe's theatre as in the novels of his contemporary Balzac. But Balzac gives you, what Scribe could not, the passion as well. Scribe's essential mediocrity and shallowness of mind was, no doubt the chief factor in his success: it kept so steadily on the mental level of his materialistic public. Like theirs, his moral code was strictly prudential and regulated by the social proprieties. Husbands always triumphed over lovers, and the cause of passion is always sacrificed to that of "la famille." "Respectability" was the chief ideal. As for history, that was a collection of trivial anecdotes, all illustrating the dictum "What great events from little causes spring." Thus Scribe wrote a play about Walpole (L'Ambitieux), in which that Minister's fortune hangs in the balance through George II.'s discovery of a love-letter tied up in the Royal mistress's handkerchief; and a play about Queen Anne (Le Verre d'Eau), in which the political history of England is vitally affected because the Duchess of Marlborough drops a glass of water in the Queen's lap. Indeed, Scribe's history is as childish as any in Hugo or Dumas père, without their excuse of making the absurdity a pretext for passionate or romantic adventure.

If there is hardly any passion in Scribe (because it is not "respectable," because it is a nuisance to "the family," because it is not correct form in the Chaussée d'Antin), still less are there any characters (because puppets will do just as well, or even better, to carry out a plot which is merely an ingenious combination of incidents). Dr. Arvin prefers to say that "this conception of dramatic art by its very nature relieves the author of the responsibility of taking account of characters, sentiment, or passion." He might as well say that it relieves the author of the responsibility of authorship. Can you think of Balzac without thinking of his characters? We say a Hulot, a Mme. Marneffe, a Pre Goriot a Rubempré, a Coralie, a Rastignac, and know them better than our own blood-relations. A list of Scribe's characters would be a list of meaningless, unidentifiable names. Is it to be wondered at that he is clean forgotten?

He might even so, have escaped oblivion, had he had the advantage of a style. But that invaluable preservative was wholly lacking; it was Théophile Gautier's perpetual grievance against him that he had no style. It is easy to overstress the point no doubt. Balzac had no style, or a very bad one, and yet has more enthusiasts to-day than he ever had in his life-time. Labiche had no style, but his eleven volumes of collected plays are still, despite the drawback, a perpetual feast of delight. On the other hand, I think some of the plays of Dumas fils live as much by their style as by their dramatic quality, or so at least I thought when I saw Le Demi-Monde in London the other day. The importance of style, the most personal or elements, in dramatic work will always be a disputable question, for it is the peculiarity of the dramatist that he never speaks in his own person. Yet every dramatist of mark has his own, unmistakable fashion of speech; Congreve's is distinct from Farquhar's, Goldsmith's from Sheridan's, Maugham's from Shaw's.

Scribe's, however, was the pedestrian slipshod which we call "no" style. It was the common language of the classes with no ear for language, the busy philistine bourgeoisie for whom Scribe wrote. No wonder the poets and critics and the whole aesthetic and literary world were banded against him!